Bill Anderson

Induction Year: 1975

Birth Name: James William Anderson III

Birth Date: 11-01-1937

Place of Birth: Columbia, South Carolina

During his long and illustrious songwriting career, Bill Anderson has been responsible for more than 100 charted country singles. Early in his career, he wrote hits for Jim Reeves and Lefty Frizzell, and in the twenty-first century he's written hit songs for Kenny Chesney and George Strait. More than 25 years after entering the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, he was still being recorded by top country artists.

Known as "Whispering Bill" for his breathy tenor voice, Anderson was born in South Carolina but raised in Georgia. Inspired by Hank Williams, he wrote his first song while still in his teens and formed his first band in 1952. While studying for his journalism degree at the University of Georgia and working as a disc jockey, he wrote his breakthrough song "City Lights." In 1958, Ray Price made it a hit, and Anderson came to Nashville to sign a song-publishing contract with Tree Publishing and a recording contract with Decca Records.

In 1960, he started having Top 10 hits as an artist, and he scored his biggest with 1963's "Still." Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he also provided dozens of hit songs to other artists, including several Top 10 country hits for Connie Smith. Anderson went through a comparatively fallow period as a songwriter in the 1980s, then staged one of the most remarkable comebacks in Nashville music history in the 1990s and beyond.

It started with the 1995 hit "Which Bridge to Burn," which Anderson co-wrote with fellow Grand Ole Opry star Vince Gill. Over the next decade and half, Anderson achieved some of his biggest successes in songwriting, creating #1 hits for Mark Wills and Kenny Chesney ("A Lot of Things Different"); the 2005
Country Music Association (CMA) Song of the Year with "Whiskey Lullaby," which was a duet hit for Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss; and the Song of the Year for both the ACM and the CMA with "Give It Away" for George Strait.

Anderson has been a member of the cast of the Grand Ole Opry since 1961. He hosted his own nationally syndicated television series from 1965 into 1974, The Bill Anderson Show. He published his autobiography in 1989 and a memoir of humorous stories in 1993.

He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. He is also a member of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame (1985), the South Carolina Music Hall of Fame (1993) and the Georgia Broadcasters Hall of Fame (1993).